New Politburo Lineup Signals Rising Stars Who May Replace Xi

Communist Party boss of Jilin province and former agriculture minister Sun Zhengcai was named to the 25-member Politburo today. Photographer: Feng Li/Getty Images

Nov. 16 (Bloomberg) -- The makeup of China’s Politburo,
with an official who once studied in the U.K. and a man
nicknamed “Little Hu,” signals that the Communist Party may
have begun grooming the leaders who will take over in a decade.

Sun Zhengcai, Communist Party boss of Jilin province and
former agriculture minister, was named to the 25-member
Politburo yesterday along with Hu Chunhua, the party secretary
of Inner Mongolia. The two, who are both 49 years old, could
succeed China’s new leaders in 2022, said Joseph Cheng, a
political science professor at the City University of Hong Kong.
They are the youngest members of the new Politburo by at least
six years.

The two appointments bring to the fore candidates for the
sixth generation of leaders since Mao Zedong founded the
People’s Republic in 1949. Many were children during the chaos
of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which shaped current leaders’
emphasis on stability at all costs, and went to university as
China embarked on reforms that spurred its rise to become the
world’s second-biggest economy.

“Their mentality is quite different,” said Zheng
Yongnian, director of the East Asian Institute at the National
University of Singapore. Hu, Sun and other younger party cadres
were educated during China’s “best decade” of political
opening, which ended with the government’s 1989 crackdown on the
Tiananmen Square protests, Zheng said.

Top Posts

If the two do assume top leadership posts 10 years from
now, their advancement within the party’s top echelons may
follow the path of Hu Jintao, whose grooming began when he was
named to the Politburo’s Standing Committee at age 49 in 1992,
said Bo Zhiyue, senior research fellow at the National
University of Singapore’s East Asia Institute who has written a
research paper on Hu Chunhua and Sun.

By contrast, Xi Jinping, who was named Communist Party
general secretary yesterday, and Li Keqiang, who is forecast to
take over from Premier Wen Jiabao in March, were elevated into
the Politburo Standing Committee in 2007 without serving in the
broader Politburo. Communist Party leaders may have decided the
next generation will need more time to prepare, Bo said.

“I think this time around they are doing a better job of
bringing younger people into the Politburo so they can start
this grooming process,” Bo said in a phone interview. “In the
case of Hu Jintao it was 10 years, but in the case of Xi Jinping
and Li Keqiang it was only five years. In Chinese politics five
years seems a little bit rushed.”

Economic Growth

Hu and Sun started their careers as paramount leader Deng
Xiaoping opened China to the rest of the world and set it down
the path of economic growth. Hu, who is five months older than
Sun, studied Chinese literature at Peking University, where many
students who participated in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests
got their education.

Sun spent a year studying in the U.K. and has an advanced
degree in agriculture, according to Cheng Li, a senior fellow at
the Washington-based Brookings Institution. In 2002, Sun was
named party secretary of Beijing’s Shunyi area, where many of
the city’s international schools and western-style villas are
located.

“Their most formative years were reform,” Bo said. “I
think they are probably going to be more open-minded, more
liberal minded, probably more international-oriented.”

While Hu and Sun’s presence on the Politburo indicates
they’re rising stars, much may change in the next five years
given the political jockeying that goes on behind the scenes in
China, according to Zheng.

Likely Evolve

Ten of 22 respondents to a Bloomberg survey in September
said the party will likely evolve in the next 10 years, with one
predicting a split, as the country addresses growing concern
over corruption, pollution and a widening wealth gap.

“Some meritocratic elements are there but it is very
difficult to be a pure meritocracy because sometimes politics
runs against that,” Zheng said.

Hunan province party boss Zhou Qiang, also tipped by Bo and
City University of Hong Kong’s Cheng as an up-and-coming leader,
didn’t make the 25-person Politburo. Zhou, 52, is forecast to be
named president of the Supreme People’s Court, the South China
Morning Post reported Nov. 11, citing four people it didn’t
identify.

Hu and Sun have handled social unrest or scandal during
their time in senior posts. Nicknamed “Little Hu” for his
close ties to Hu Jintao, Hu Chunhua rose through the ranks in
Tibet, becoming deputy party secretary before moving on to the
top job in Inner Mongolia, which supplies most of China’s raw
coal.

Street Protests

During his time there, ethnic Mongolians took to the
streets in protest after a coal truck ran over a herdsman. Hu
acknowledged “public anger,” and the government later
announced measures to improve miner training. Police were also
deployed across the province to quell the protests.

When China’s leaders decide to select a member of the sixth
generation for the Politburo Standing Committee, “Hu Chunhua
would be a prime candidate,” Brookings’s Li wrote in a paper on
China’s future leaders.

In 2006, Sun became China’s youngest ministerial-level
official at the time, when he was named agriculture minister. He
oversaw the government response to a 2008 tainted-milk scandal
in which at least six infants were killed and tens of thousands
of people got sick. Sun said a “serious lack of regulation”
was to blame for the contaminated milk and he oversaw a
crackdown on lax production methods.

Educational Pedigree

The two men have strong educational pedigrees, making them
better trained than Xi, Li and other members of the current
generation of leaders, Cheng said.

A decision to move Hu and Sun from their current posts to
larger and richer provinces, as happened with Xi, may be a sign
that they are being groomed for the top positions, said Cheng.

“The later generations will have better qualifications,”
Cheng said. “Given their age, they certainly have considerable
grassroots experience, and have a lot of experience visiting
foreign countries and receiving foreign delegations.”